


The White Rose

by gamerfic



Series: Ghost stories from Kate Bush songs [2]
Category: Under the Ivy - Kate Bush (Song)
Genre: Dark Fantasy, Don't Have to Know Canon, F/F, Gen, Ghosts, Horrible Internecine Fantasy Politics, Implied Femslash, Revenge, Secrets, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-01 22:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4036120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamerfic/pseuds/gamerfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beneath the white rose bush in the gardens of the Ducal Palace, Mayra taught Leonor about the power of secrets. But Leonor would have to learn on her own that the greatest power of all is found in how everyone's secrets are revealed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The White Rose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GreenPhoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenPhoenix/gifts).



> [Inspired by the song "Under the Ivy" by Kate Bush.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLaUgi1AzC0)

On the night that Leonor, the fostered daughter of House Alcala, was betrothed to Rodrigo of House Ourente, she slipped away from the celebratory banquet and into the gardens of the Ducal Palace before anyone noticed she had gone. The chatter of the feast and the songs of the minstrels faded away as her wanderings led her past other revelers who were using the gardens for gossip, eavesdropping, and furtive trysts. They were all so engrossed in their little games that none of them recognized her, for all that she was the guest of honor. Those who noticed her at all saw only a sad and slender girl with curly black hair and dark skin retreating between the hedges.

At last, Leonor found herself in a small alcove tucked away at the north end of the grounds. Thick, glossy ivy cascaded down the ancient stone walls. A huge, gnarled rose bush covered in white flowers sprawled in one of the corners. She sank down onto a small iron bench and let loose the tears she had been holding back. But she just as quickly choked them off when the leaves of the bush begin to rustle and someone softly said, "Who's there?"

Leonor did not respond. She sat perfectly still and watched with curiosity as another girl crawled out from beneath the rose bush. The girl might have been ten or eleven years old, close to Leonor's own age. Dead leaves and rose petals were tangled in her braided blonde hair, and she wore an ornate and ruffled white dress with dirt staining its fraying hem. She rose to her feet, brushing blades of grass from her scuffed knees. "Oh," she said after she finally got a clear look at Leonor by the light of the full moon. "I know who you are. Leonor the Fosterling."

"How do you know that?" Leonor asked, sitting up a little straighter.

"I listen to what my father says. Sometimes. And he said that Duke Ourente was having a party because someone named Leonor was getting betrothed to his son. And since he said Leonor was my age, and because of what you're wearing..." The other girl gestured at Leonor's elegant green and grey gown - the heraldic colors of House Ourente. "...I made a lucky guess."

"Who is your father?"

"He's not important," the girl said, perhaps too quickly and dismissively. "But my name is Mayra." Even as young as they were, Leonor and Mayra knew that the etiquette of first introductions obligated them to go through the usual series of bows and gestures of respect, and they imitated their parents' studied postures as best as they were able. "So, why did you leave the party?" Mayra asked when they were finished.

"It will be years before Rodrigo and I are old enough to marry. No one really cares about me until then. Besides, it's not my party anyway. I didn't make any decisions worth celebrating. Lord and Lady Alcala need to make peace with House Ourente, and the easiest way to do that is to arrange a marriage. They'd rather use their fosterling for that than one of their real children."

"My father says you should be grateful they took you in," said Mayra. Her tone was calm and neutral, so different from the angry voice which Lady Alcala usually used when she spat those words at Leonor. It made Leonor want to trust her, though she wasn't sure why.

"Well, my real parents are still dead because of their stupid war." Being angry and blunt for once gave her a small, illicit thrill that pulled her along through all the things she was so relieved to finally admit. "I'm grateful they took me in. But not for the rest of it." Then Leonor saw that Mayra was staring, wide-eyed, and her excitement abruptly evaporated. Leonor looked down at the ground. "I don't think I should have said that. I'm sorry."

"It was a secret," said Mayra softly. "Secrets are really important. At least that's what my father says." She reached out and patted Leonor's shoulder. "Don't worry. I won't tell yours to anyone."

"How can I believe that? I don't even know you." The words came out sounding crueler than Leonor had intended them, an attempt at mimicking the firm insistence she so often heard from the adults around her when they wanted to be sure of having their way.

But Mayra did not seem offended, only thoughtful. "I understand," she said, and then a smile spread across her face. "What if I told you a secret, too, and asked you to keep it safe? Then we would be equal again."

"Yes," said Leonor. "That would be fair."

Mayra's smile turned shy. "Come with me, then." She knelt down again in front of the rose bush, and gestured for Leonor to follow her. "Be careful of the thorns." Leonor cautiously crawled behind her past the thick leaves, into the hollow center of the bush, where bending branches twined together overhead to make a verdant roof. Yet Mayra continued on, through the roses and toward the garden wall, brushing aside long tendrils of ivy to reveal a hidden gap between the stones that led to a narrow, cozy space concealed within the walls.

"This is amazing," Leonor said as she looked around Mayra's tiny hideaway. It was clear that Mayra had been coming there for quite some time. She had furnished it with threadbare pillows and scraps of tapestries, had hidden away food and drink and books and toys and even a chess set on a small, rickety table. "Where did you get all of this?"

"There are things nobody wants anymore. I take them and use them." Mayra sat down on one of the pillows with worry suddenly knitting her brows together. "You won't tell anyone I showed you this, will you?"

"Of course not. My real parents raised me to keep my promises." Leonor sat down on the other side of the table and gestured at the chessboard. "Do you know how to play?"

"A little. I'm not very good."

Leonor smiled. "I'm not either. We can learn together. Anything is better than that party."

So Leonor set the pieces on the board, and Mayra found some saffron cookies that were only a little stale, and they played chess together until Leonor heard someone calling her name. Leonor's eyes widened. "That's Lady Alcala. I need to leave before she finds me here." She brushed the curtain of ivy aside and crawled through the gap in the wall.

"Wait," said Mayra, and Leonor stopped. Mayra reached up, plucked a white rose from the bush, and tucked it behind Leonor's ear. "A gift for your betrothal."

Leonor thought that meeting Mayra had been gift enough, but all she said was, "Thank you. I hope we can see each other again."

"I'm sure we will," said Mayra with a smile, and disappeared behind the ivy again.

Lady Alcala's calls for Leonor were becoming louder and increasingly urgent, so Leonor hurried through the gardens until she found her foster mother. "Where have you been?" said Lady Alcala, pressing her lips together into a thin, disapproving line. "You can't just disappear like that anymore. It reflects poorly on House Ourente." Leonor dipped her head in an insincere apology and followed Lady Alcala to the courtyard where the guests' carriages were waiting, to think about everything that had happened as the nobles said their farewells.

Lady Alcala had sent off the delegations of least a dozen Houses before she noticed the white rose in Leonor's hair. Her mouth dropped open. "Where did you get that? Take it off." Lady Alcala reached for the rose, but Leonor grabbed it first and tucked it beneath the sash of her dress. "By all the Silent Gods, if Duke Ourente had seen you wearing that..."

Leonor couldn't suppress her curiosity. "What's so bad about a white rose?"

Lady Alcala lowered her voice. "The white rose is the heraldic symbol of House Batran. You've studied this already, Leonor. You need to remember these things."

The long, tedious hours that Leonor had spent with her history tutors came back to her. "Wasn't House Batran an ally of House Ourente in the Twenty-Seventh War of Succession?"

"Yes. The previous Lord Batran was Duke Ourente's spymaster - until he betrayed House Ourente to its enemies. House Ourente prevailed in the end, of course, and Duke Ourente had Lord Batran executed for his crimes when he took the Ducal Chair. The Duke will surely never trust anyone from their House again. You must never do anything to make House Ourente think that you owe anything to House Batran. It could ruin everything for us."

Leonor felt her stomach sink as she remembered her earlier conversation with Mayra. "Which one is the new Lord Batran again?" she asked.

Lady Alcala shook her head in disappointment at Leonor's ignorance, but she subtly indicated a tall, pale, blond young man waiting for a carriage, with an equally young wife on his arm. Trailing behind them in her disheveled white dress was the same strange girl who had taken Leonor under the ivy. _Mayra, of House Batran._ Mayra must have felt Leonor's eyes on her, because she looked over her shoulder and flashed a slight smile. With Lady Alcala watching, Leonor didn't dare to respond. She brushed her fingertips across the white rose hidden in her sash. She knew she would no sooner lose it than she would lose the memory of this night.

* * *

So says one of many legends about the night that Leonor the Fosterling of House Alcala first met Mayra of House Batran. Of course, no one else was there with Leonor and Mayra in the gardens of the Ducal Palace, so any story told about them will always be just that: a story. But everyone agrees that following the betrothal feast, Leonor and Mayra soon became each other's best and only friend. Despite Lady Alcala's warnings, and despite the similar ones that Lord Batran must certainly have given to his daughter, the two girls could not stay away from each other. At every gathering of the Houses they were seen together in the banquet halls and the ballrooms and the courtyards, playing with dolls or teaching each other new chess strategies or simply conversing for long hours. During social events at the Ducal Palace, they often vanished completely, hiding from the crowds of nobles in Mayra's secret place under the ivy.

When Leonor and Mayra were still children, their inopportune friendship could be overlooked. Almost everyone who played the Great Game of Houses had fond memories of youthful friendships with the children of their parents' rivals, back when they had all been too young to understand politics. But Leonor and Mayra never learned that they should know better. As the girls grew into young women, they still found each other again and again, still slipped away from every party together no matter how much anyone else disapproved.

As an adult, Mayra stayed strange and retiring, taking in everything with her wide green eyes, wandering through life along a path that only she could discern. Leonor, on the other hand, lost her will to keep silent. Gone was the quiet, melancholy girl who had stood wordless and expressionless beside her foster parents and her fiancé. Now she was unafraid to say exactly what she thought about the Great Game of Houses. Duke and Duchess Ourente had hoped for an uncomplaining bride for Rodrigo, devoid of ambition and too indebted to the kindness of House Alcala to give voice to any radical opinions. It seemed they would no longer get their wish.

Everyone noticed. Everyone talked. Many nobles believed that the friendship between the girls was a sham, that Mayra was manipulating Leonor at the behest of Lord Batran. Or perhaps it was the other way around, some speculated, and Leonor had befriended Mayra as part of a scheme to break House Batran's power for good. Still others claimed that dark sorcery was at play, since the women of House Batran were believed to possess great skill in witchcraft. And some whispered that more than simple friendship lay between Leonor and Mayra - that their intimacy had deepened into something richer and wilder, that at their secret meetings they no longer only played chess and ate stolen cookies. That possibility alone was far from scandalous; even if the tales were true, Leonor would hardly be the first person to keep up appearances in a necessary marriage while discreetly maintaining a lover who befitted her true preference. Rather, it was the thought of carrying on with the child of a sworn enemy that set tongues wagging and gossip flying all across the duchy.

The persistent rumors greatly increased House Alcala and House Ourente's long-standing concerns about Rodrigo's future bride. Keeping Leonor and Mayra apart was not truly an option so long as the etiquette of the Great Game of Houses demanded that House Ourente could not fully exclude House Batran from the society of the duchy. Besides, snubbing House Batran would send the message that Duke Ourente was too weak to rule over his own House, to say nothing of the others. No matter what anyone said to Leonor, no matter how many times they tried to convince her to give up her friendship with Mayra, she refused. A popular tale claimed that she had been overheard telling Lady Alcala with fire in her eyes, "I don't care about tradition, or what the Wars of Succession cost you, or how long everything has been this way! If the Houses are so weak that a simple friendship threatens all of them, then perhaps they have outlived their usefulness!"

At last, Duke Ourente could see only one way out of his predicament: for Leonor and Rodrigo to be married as quickly as possible. As a married woman, Leonor would reside in the Ducal Palace instead of in House Alcala's estates. The change of dwelling would bring her under House Ourente's direct influence, and her new husband and the House's advisors might then find it easier to convince her to see reason. If nothing else, the Duke could always hope that the running of a household and the eventual bearing and raising of heirs might keep Leonor too occupied for any overly close relationships outside of the palace walls.

Leonor did not resist her arranged marriage, even as the preparations for it accelerated with startling speed. She offered no complaints about the decorations, or the dress that was chosen for her, or the banquet menu. Her single specific request about her wedding day, from which she would not be swayed, was that Mayra be permitted to stand as one of her attendants. Lady Alcala fumed at the thought, but Duke Ourente simply shook his head in resignation. "Let her have her wish," he said. "Soon enough it won't matter anymore."

Rodrigo and Leonor's wedding day finally arrived, cold and clear and starkly illuminated beneath a cloudless cerulean sky. The guests gathered at the edge of the ocean, and the presiding priestess waded into the frigid water and led the bride and groom along behind her as she performed the traditional chants, the libations to the ancestors, the rites of purification. All of the Houses were present as witnesses to their vows - all, that is, except for one. One attendant was missing from Leonor's side of the driftwood altar. As the priestess built up the bonfire over which the newlywed couple would leap, the guests saw Leonor's gaze scanning the crowd for Mayra in vain. But the ceremony concluded, and the priestess pronounced Rodrigo and Leonor husband and wife, without any sign of any member of House Batran.

It was not until days later, after Rodrigo and Leonor had spent their wedding night in the Ducal Palace and then embarked on the traditional tour of the other Houses' manors that would formally introduce them to their allies and their rivals, that the truth of what had happened came out. As the nobles of House Solano were returning to their own lands by way of the Northwestern Highway, they came upon a wrecked carriage, emblazoned with a white rose, in a roadside ditch. Any valuables it had contained were long gone, suggesting that the attack was the work of highwaymen. But inside the carriage, their weapons uselessly drawn, their bodies pierced by sword thrusts and crossbow quarrels, lay the mortal remains of the infamous betrayers who still bore the name of House Batran.

Nobody witnessed the moment when Leonor, now of House Ourente, was informed of Mayra's death. The messenger who bore the news wanted no part of her reaction, and fled as soon as he pressed the letter into her hands. Some say that she wept hysterically for days; others, that she read the letter in a dreadful silence that never truly lifted. But on one detail, everyone agreed: On the morning after Leonor's wedding and Mayra's death, the sun rose over the the gardens of the Ducal Palace to reveal that the white rose bush under which the two girls had first met had withered overnight to a dried, skeletal husk that sent out the smell of decaying petals on the wind. Nothing that the palace gardeners did could stir it back to life or entice it to bloom again.

* * *

When Leonor returned to the Ducal Palace as a married woman, she had changed. She did not mourn loudly or openly, or rage at the loss of her friend. If she grieved, she did so privately, with a newfound stillness in her posture the only outward sign of the sadness she must surely have felt. Instead, she threw herself into studies of the inner workings of her new House, learning everything from the names of its servants to the details of its treaties to the most obscure facts about its ancient history. The nobles who had hoped that she would grow into her new role privately exulted, thinking that marriage and other recent events truly had changed her. They also hoped that Leonor would soon bear a child to seal the alliance of Ourente and Alcala - but no such announcement came, even as the months wore on. Some of them whispered that Mayra had used her dying breath to curse the couple with barrenness, but other, more rational people thought it more likely that Leonor had simply chosen to shun Rodrigo's bed.

Nearly a year had passed since Leonor and Rodrigo's wedding before the Houses began to realize that something was wrong. Long-hidden secrets were coming to light at a pace so fast that it could not be coincidence. It was to be expected that certain uncomfortable truths would naturally slip out no matter how any House tried to hide them - an illegitimate child here, an act of espionage there, connections to a smuggling ring elsewhere - but for a new embarrassment to come to light each fortnight, as predictable as the tides, was unheard of.

Now, on a regular basis, evidence of a House's darkest transgressions would appear before the person who stood to be most affected by them. Lady Marin awoke one morning to find the private letters exchanged between her husband and his mistress from a rival House lying on her bedside table, tied neatly with a white ribbon. On another day, all of the Houses who traded with House Restrepo received carefully lettered copies of a convincing and thoroughly researched missive explaining the many ways in which Lady Restrepo was taking financial advantage of them. At the autumnal equinox, when the devout confess their sins and beg forgiveness because on this day the Silent Gods are most likely to hear the prayers of the faithful, a cook who had spent decades in the employ of House Questi came to his master and tearfully confessed that House Puron had hired him to poison the Questi heir, and that his actions had caused the boy's lengthy illness the year before. The actions and reactions of the central players in each of these small dramas would then send out ripples through each other House in turn.

But a strange thing happened as secrets continued to come out. Of course there was anger, and hurt, and duels, and vows of enmity, and more than a few bloody acts of reprisal - but only at first. As so much that had been hidden emerged, targeting Houses seemingly at random, the nobles lost their stomach for the bloodier parts of the political game. For some of the Houses, the revelation of their long-hidden shame even served as the first step toward making amends with ancient rivals. As the months went on and the slow leaks showed no signs of stopping, Leonor's voice was one of the most prominent to call for a cessation of hostilities between the Houses and a re-evaluation of the current state of affairs. "When everybody has cause to seek revenge," she counseled, "nobody has cause to seek revenge." Against all odds, and in keeping with Leonor's guidance, an uneasy peace emerged.

Until Duchess Ourente was found dead at the bottom of the stairs that led to her private study in one of the towers of the Ducal Palace. It happened during the Midsummer Ball, when the most powerful members of every House put in an appearance to see and be seen on the longest day of the year. The guests first realized that something was wrong when sheets of parchment burst from the windows of the duchess's tower, fluttering unpredictably on the wind like wounded birds and blanketing the palace grounds. Of course, everyone picked them up, some more subtly than others. It was Duchess Ourente's private correspondence, and what the guests read in it was shocking but not exactly surprising.

House Ourente had won the Twenty-Seventh War of Succession, and maintained its hold on the Ducal Palace, largely due to the unrivaled strength of its mercenary armies. Peace was bad for their business - and Duchess Ourente's letters revealed her efforts at preventing it. She had hired bandits to harry travelers, had paid off desperate peasant families to encroach upon other Houses' farmland and poach their game, had whispered lies into the ears of her friends and enemies alike to encourage them to turn on one another. Even if the moods of the Houses had not already been turned toward reconciliation, the sheer extent of Duchess Ourente's manipulations would have given any House cause to question her actions.

As it turned out, no one would get the chance to confront her. A servant dispatched in search of Duchess Ourente discovered her broken body sprawled at the foot of the tower stairs. Whether the duchess had fallen or been pushed, no one could say. They only knew that her face had twisted in death into a rictus of terror, and that in one hand she held a single white rose, clutched tightly enough for its thorns to draw blood.

* * *

Duke Ourente did not take the death of his wife lightly. He turned every ounce of his power and every coin in his treasury toward finding her killer. In the absence of any real evidence, his efforts took the form of lashing out at his longtime enemies and at anyone he suspected of abetting the Duchess's alleged murder. His behavior grew increasingly erratic, his acts of retribution more capricious. "Your Grace," Leonor was heard to say to the Duke after one public audience in which he had formally and furiously broken ties with a longtime ally of House Ourente, "perhaps it is time you let this go. What happened to your wife will likely never be fully explained. Mourn her, and move on before you make things even worse."

But the Duke did not relent. If anything, his accusations of treachery reached farther with each passing day. Some of the nobles thought that Leonor still might have been able to convince him to stop. The Duke thought little of her, but many of his advisors had come to respect the knowledge and insight she had studied so hard to gain; perhaps they could be made to intervene. But as it became apparent that the Duke intended to disregard any and all advice, the nobles noticed the new, firm set to Leonor's jaw and understood that she was finished with sharing her plans with others.

One lunar month after Duchess Ourente's death, representatives of every House gathered at the Ducal Palace to pay their respects at her formal wake. The event was well underway in all of its solemn yet celebratory pageantry when a single bedraggled figure slipped in through the north gate, admitted by a guardswoman with whom he exchanged a single knowing glance. Unnoticed by anyone, he crept into the banquet hall and took up a place in the line of people waiting to make toasts to the memory of Duchess Ourente. (The toasts were, of course, carefully constructed to direct subtle yet viciously barbed insults toward the speaker's rivals by hiding them within extravagant and flowery praise of the deceased.) The stranger was a mystery with a dusty coat and a pair of sabres, patiently and silently awaiting his chance to speak.

When the stranger's turn finally came, he looked out over the assembled guests with a grim expression on his face and said, "I confess that I never met Duchess Ourente. In truth, I dealt with her husband the Duke, and that was through an intermediary. But this may be the only chance I will ever have to say what must be said." He reached into his coat and pulled out a small leather purse, filled to the brim with gold coins minted by the Duke, cast with his image in profile. "I also confess that I have been a highwayman on the roads of this duchy. Through the Duke's intermediary, my companions and I took this payment in exchange for killing House Batran on their way to the wedding of the Duke's son."

Chaos ensued. House Ourente's guards seized the highwayman and carried him away. He was never seen again. There were those who claimed that the Duke had him slain that very night, and others who claimed that the Duke kept him alive long enough to question him first. They say that when the Duke demanded to know why anyone would admit to such an act, knowing it would cost him his life, the highwayman's eyes went fearful and haunted. "My conscience would not permit it," he said, and nothing more.

The highwayman's claims could never be fully proven, but they inspired great suspicion and decreased confidence in House Ourente's leadership of the duchy. The Duke redoubled his investigative efforts, turning his attention toward finding out who or what had convinced the highwayman to make his confession at the wake. It was an even more futile endeavour than the search for Duchess Ourente's killer had been - but it would not persist for long. Not two months after Duchess Ourente's death, Duke Ourente joined her in whatever afterlife awaited them. A fisherman gathering mussels at dawn on the rocky coast beneath the Ducal Palace found the Duke's mangled body at the foot of the tallest tower. His dead and staring eyes were wide with fear, and there was a single white rose between his teeth.

* * *

As the only living child of House Ourente, Rodrigo was the Duke's sole heir, although the lords and ladies of many other Houses privately doubted that he was ready to rule. At his coronation, Leonor was one of many to advise caution in his new role. "Your father made many mistakes in the last months of his life," she told Rodrigo quietly as they sat together at the head banquet table. "You have the opportunity to avoid repeating them. The Houses are ready for peace, my husband. Give them what they want."

But the guests at the banquet heard Rodrigo's response - "Do not presume to understand the Great Game of Houses, wife. I will assert my power as I see fit." - and knew that peace would never come as long as he ruled the duchy.

So Rodrigo continued in his father's footsteps, seeking the identities of his parents' killers and of whoever had revealed the Houses' secrets. His paranoia deepened, and he saw treachery around every corner and assassins behind every door. Knowing that the Duke and Duchess had both died from a fall, he took up residence in the lowest level of the palace and set a constant rotation of guards around his suite. "I am the last in the line of Ourente," he told his advisors when they demanded to know why he had all but withdrawn from the Great Game of Houses. "If I fall, the duchy falls with me. I must protect my own life at all costs." As for Leonor, he had her kept under guard in the Duchess's former study, claiming that she would be safest apart from him. Many nobles saw this as a great act of cowardice. If Rodrigo truly believed Leonor was safest locked up in a tower, why would he not choose such protection for himself? Could it be that he intended to use his own wife as bait to draw out his parents' killer? This terrible possibility came to be accepted as truth by many Houses. Even some of Rodrigo's closest allies distanced themselves from him, no longer wishing to tie their own fortunes to his madness.

The longer Rodrigo's search wore on, the more his wits departed him. He pursued impossible theories and wild imaginings. He trusted only himself and meted out harsh punishments to anyone who dared to suggest that his perspective might be skewed. Rodrigo suspected anyone who questioned him of being an agent of House Batran, striking back at House Ourente through means he could not discern. He even claimed to detect the scent of roses in his rooms, a cloying and overwhelming odor that no one else could smell.

On the last night of Rodrigo's life, the last person to see him alive was the servant who he brutally beat with his father's lacquered wooden cane. When she entered his suite and uncovered the tray that contained his dinner, he cried out in terror at the pattern on the china: a tangle of intertwined white roses. The servant insisted that she had not chosen the dishes, that she had not even looked under the tray's cover before she brought the food to him, but in his all-consuming fury Rodrigo would hear none of it. "House Batran is mocking me!" he screamed between blows from the cane. "They want me to believe I am going mad! But I am not mad! I swear it by all the Silent Gods!" At last the servant's sobbing denials seemed to make him realize that he would learn nothing useful from her even if she really was working for House Batran, and he shoved her out the door and into the arms of an appalled soldier who rushed her to the palace healers. The guards heard breaking dishes and incoherent shouting from inside Rodrigo's rooms, then the sound of the door being barred from the inside, then nothing more.

What happened next could never be fully explained. After several hours, Rodrigo broke the long silence from inside the locked rooms with a strangled gasp. Then he let out a low cry of, "It's you! But you're dead! It can't be you!" His voice rose to a piercing scream and then faded away into a faint gurgle. The guards broke down the door and rushed inside to find him dead on the floor. Utter, abject terror showed on his features, although not a single mark nor injury could be found on his body. White rose petals drifted in the air on unseen currents, slowly and softly spiraling down to blanket every surface in the room. The petals that had come to rest in front of Rodrigo's corpse spelled out a single word: ENOUGH.

With everyone in the palace thus understandably distracted, nobody saw what happened at Duchess Ourente's tower. The single guard who had been posted at its locked door was never able to explain why she had collapsed into a deep sleep in the middle of her watch, to be awakened hours later by a concerned chamberlain. While she slept, somehow the door to the tower had come open by itself and Leonor of Ourente had slipped out silently into the night.

* * *

Nobody knows for certain what became of Leonor after Rodrigo died. But many people believe that when Leonor left the Duchess's tower, stepping cautiously over the sleeping form of the guard, she carried a traveler's pack on her back as though she had prepared for this moment. She moved unseen through the palace and into the gardens, threading her way through the hedge maze until she reached the tiny, forgotten alcove where the twisted, withered remains of Mayra's rose bush still crouched beneath the ivy-covered wall.

Leonor reached into her pack and pulled out handful after handful of tattered, yellowed parchments and released them into the steady wind, to blow over the garden wall, onto the highways, into the sea. Once they had been Mayra's, a short lifetime's worth of stories kept in confidence that she had borrowed from her father or carefully gleaned from her own quiet observations. Later they had been Leonor's only weapon, the tool with which she had slowly chipped away at the cage that surrounded her and everyone else. Now they belonged to the world again. At last, she took out a dried white rose - the same one that Mayra had given her on the night they first met, so many years ago - and laid it reverently on the hard, dry ground.

"I did everything you asked, Mayra," said Leonor to the emptiness that surrounded her. "I gave away all of your secrets. If this doesn't change things, nothing ever will. I've done everything I could, and more. I'm ready for you to tell me what happens next." She collapsed onto the rusted bench where she had sat alone so many years ago, too weary and numb to cry.

But the air in front of Leonor began to shimmer and solidify, until it coalesced into the shape of a familiar young woman, pale and mysterious, beautiful and dead. Mayra said nothing, and reached out her hand and beckoned Leonor to her. They knelt down together in the dry leaves and dead petals on the ground, and Leonor followed Mayra past the rose bush and under the ivy, back once more into the secret place they had shared as children, never to be seen again by the eyes of any mortal.

The Twenty-Seventh War of Succession was the last. The Great Game of Houses is a relic, a reminder of the dark time through which the duchy had to pass in order to arrive at its current age of enlightenment. History has remembered Leonor the Fosterling, who bore the names of House Alcala and House Ourente but never truly belonged to either. It has largely forgotten Mayra of House Batran, but perhaps Mayra herself would have wanted it that way. Even Leonor herself has passed into the realm of legend now, and no one can be certain how much of what survives about her is truth, and how much is poetic invention. But one part of her story is for certain: On the night that Rodrigo of Ourente died, the rose bush in the gardens that had been dead for so long burst suddenly back into vibrant life, unfurling its leaves and petals and sowing its seeds on a midnight breeze that carried them to every corner of the Ducal Palace's grounds. And to this very day, within the ruins of that overgrown and once-great citadel, wild white roses still bloom as far as the eye can see.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my faithful beta reader [Mendeia](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/mendeia), whose valuable and insightful feedback made this a much better story.


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